Friday, January 10, 2003

Filling the gaps in a Domino environment

I have been dropped into documenting some of the additional tools we use to manage our Domino environments. As with any Domino implementation of more than a trivial size we have developed a number of useful databases and agents to make administration more bearable. Our network covers the globe but some far flung parts provide limited communications bandwidth. These tools let us do remote admin without trying to establish an admin session to a server across one of the thin pipes. We still do remote admin if we need to, but often a change needs to be made everywhere and AdminP isn't perfect.

We have built a notes app that enables our help desk staff to create both Notes and Active Directory accounts. In this way we can keep the NT account in sync with a common shortname, and know the accounts are always in sync.

The other main component is a Global Admin Tools (GAT) database that contains a bunch of configuration documents and agents that let us reach out and whack stuff wherever it is. At the moment, it can do the following tricks:

Office group creation and population - each office has a set of standard groups and this agent repopulates these groups each night from the Domino directory;

Central Office group population - same concept as above, but more sophisticated collection of groups;

Orphan mail database notification - just to make sure that AdminP is doing its job this agent checks mail databases against person docs and tells us of any orphan mail DBs;

Mail Culling - everyone's favourite topic. Mail policy allow each mail user 100Mb of mail. Each week this agent runs and if the mail is over 100Mb, deletes messages over 75 days. YES - we do have a warning in the mail DB postopen to warn the punter, and YES we run a compact before the cull;

Create replicas on all cluster members - There has been a variant of this agent at every place I have worked that used clustering. Agent checks specific directories on each server and creates replicas of the DBs on other cluster members if they don't exist. Does R6 do this automatically - we'll find out soon;

Update ACL entries for a specific database - we have a range of databases that are specific to each office and don't have replica here. We can created a profile in the GAT DB and update the ACL of these DBs at each location in one swoop;

Create Full Text Index for a specific database - create a profile and create a FT index on every server where DB is located;

Delete a specific database - deletes any DB, template or file on any server;